How can shared and on-demand mobility complement public transit?

São Paulo is home to 20.7 million residents, making it the biggest city in the Southern Hemisphere. Commuting in this bustling Brazilian city is a serious affair: the region sees a whopping 44 million trips every day, with public transit, motorized and non-motorized modes each accounting for about 1/3 of the total. The average public transit commute clocks in at 67 minutes. However, commuting times can be much longer for those in the periphery, where lower-income households tend to live. This penalizes the mobility of the poor. For instance, wealthier residents take almost twice as many trips as poorer residents.

While public transit has a relatively high reach across the metropolitan region, it falls short of the growing demand, and historical underinvestment has led to growing motorization. Congestion in Sao Paulo is among the worst in Latin America. In 2013, the productivity losses and pollution associated with congestion costed the metropolitan area close to 8% of its GDP, or over 1% of Brazil’s total GDP.

In the last decades, the World Bank Group has been working closely with São Paulo to boost public transport infrastructure and policies, which has helped the city expand mass transit coverage and develop a more comprehensive approach to urban transport.

The latest wave of disruptive technologies that is reshaping the transport sector –including shared mobility platforms, electric vehicles, and automation— are now providing exciting new ways to build on these gains. If properly integrated into broader public transport policies, these innovations have the potential to reduce the use of single-occupancy vehicles, decrease pollution and carbon emissions, improve traffic flow, and save energy.

Among all these new technologies, let’s take a closer look at shared mobility and on-demand mobility solutions like ride-hailing apps or bikeshare systems, which have been growing rapidly around the world.